Vacuum cleaners are generally supplied with a range of tools for dealing with specific types of cleaning. The tools include a floor tool for general on-the-floor cleaning. It is well-known to provide a floor tool in which a brush bar is rotatably mounted within a suction opening on the underside of the tool, with the brush bar being driven by an air turbine. The brush bar serves to agitate the floor surface beneath the tool so as to release dirt, dust, hair, fluff and other debris from the floor surface where it can then be carried by the flow of air to the vacuum cleaner itself. The turbine can be driven solely by ‘dirty’ air which enters the tool via the suction opening, it can be driven solely by ‘clean’ air which enters the tool via a dedicated inlet which is separate from the main suction opening, or it can be driven by a combination of dirty and clean air.
In a turbine driven tool which has a dedicated clean air inlet to drive the turbine which is separate from the main, floor engaging inlet, there can be a difficulty in driving the turbine at a sufficient speed. When viewed in terms of the amount of resistance experienced by the airflow, the path through the main inlet offers a lower resistance than the path through the turbine inlet. Thus, the airflow will tend to take the lower resistance path through the main inlet.